Jane and the Wandering Eye (28 page)

“Oh, as to that—do not trouble to consider of it further. For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? It shall be
forgot, and Green Park Buildings returned to its usual obscurity.”

“Your complaisance does you credit. I must hope that Maria Conyngham possesses not half so much—or I shall be sadly thwarted in my efforts to provoke her this evening.”

“Provocation is all very well—but I would counsel, my lord, that you undertake it only with the most zealous care for your person. There is a danger in travelling alone. My chair was waylaid by footpads as I attempted a return from the Lower Rooms last evening.”

“Footpads! I had not an idea of it!” Lord Harold turned to me in astonishment. “They were after your purse?”

“—Though there was little enough within. I recognised one of the men, however, as he held a knife to my throat—and informed the constable of his name and direction. He was a certain Smythe, of the Theatre Royal. I had remarked him Thursday when we ventured to the wings, as a man quite subject to Hugh Conyngham’s direction. And though his beard and headgear obscured his face, I could hardly have been mistaken—for Smythe possesses one blue, and one brown eye; and thus must be instantly known, even in darkness.”

I spoke with tolerable composure, but Lord Harold’s distress was sudden and extreme.

“He held a knife to your throat!”

“Do not concern yourself, I beg. He very soon ran off, when I summoned breath enough to scream. But I should be interested to learn whether the constable succeeded in seizing him. You might find it out at the theatre this evening.”

“And you believe this villain was despatched by one of the company?” Lord Harold enquired in the grimmest accent.

“I am utterly convinced of it—by Hugh Conyngham
himself, perhaps. Our conversation in the Lower Rooms last night must somehow have excited that gentleman’s anxiety; and from a fear, perhaps, of the letters’ exposure—or a fear of my intimacy with yourself—he determined that I should be silenced.”

“But you cannot have betrayed our suspicions so completely, Jane! And yet you think the man Smythe intended your death?”

“I detected no gentleness in his look—only the coldest light of determination.”

Lord Harold snapped the reins over the back of his team, though the horses already moved smartly enough. “When I think that I might have prevented it! Had I never urged you to deceive Conyngham, while I searched the manager’s office, you should not have been exposed to this danger.”

“You must not reproach yourself, my lord. I am no slip of a girl to require excessive protection; what I have done, was done of my own free will. I impart the particulars only so that you may be on your guard. For if you persist in baiting Maria Conyngham, you surely risk the gravest injury. Have a care, Lord Harold—and trust no one’s appearance of benevolence.”

“You could not have bestowed your warning on a less likely object,” he replied with mirth. “It is many years, indeed, since I have trusted the appearance of anything like disinterested good.”

We achieved the stoop of Green Park Buildings, and he jumped down to hand me to the street.

“Jane, Jane,” he said with a sigh, “I regret your misfortune extremely.”

“Not another word, my lord. I would not forfeit the thrill of this chase for a thousand footpads. And there is Lord Kinsfell to be thought of—is he to rot in gaol for the preservation of a man like Smythe? Never!”

Lord Harold surveyed me with a judicious air. “It is as
much as I would expect of you, my dear. Having risked your life thus far, may I enquire whether you would accompany me to Bristol on the morrow? I should value your penetration extremely.”

“Sunday travel? I should never hear the end of it, among the Austens,” I mused with a smile.
³
“But I think I shall attend you, all the same. Tomorrow is my birthday, Lord Harold, and I shall regard the journey as in tribute to my natal day! But you
must
allow me an hour first for the observance of morning service. I might pray to be forgiven my family’s poor opinion.”

“Capital!” he cried. “Expect my carriage at eleven o’clock. We shall be returned in time for dinner.”

Chapter 13
A Confidential Nuncheon

Sunday,
16 December 1804
~

A
QUIET
S
UNDAY SERVICE AT THE
Q
UEEN’S CHAPEL, FOLLOWED
by a short turn in the muddy Crescent—and so the morning of my twenty-ninth birthday passed as many a Sabbath, while resident in Bath.
¹
Though quite out of charity with all my beloved family, I was nonetheless treated to some small remembrances of the day—an embroidered needle-case from dear Cassandra, offered with an anxious look; from my father, a handsome set of Maria Edgeworth’s
Castle Rackrent
, bound in vellum and tooled in gold; and from my mother, who learned somehow of the slyness of the Bath
Chronicle
, a lecture on the foolishness of impropriety in one so nearly beyond the marriageable age. Did I suffer my reputation to sink, no respectable gentleman would
ever
solicit my hand, and
how my dear mother was expected to keep me once Reverend Austen was cold in his grave, she could not begin to think. She then exclaimed at length upon the subject of Lord Harold, and went so far as to solicit my father’s authority, and beg that he should abhor the acquaintance—but the Reverend George, however uneasy in his own mind, refused to censure my activity so much. I was, he declared, a woman of some maturity, and must exert my own judgement in these and all matters; I should not have my father to look to, in a very few years more; and if the principles with which I had been raised, did not serve as friends in the present case, he could do nothing further with me.

I reminded my mother that our beloved Madam Lefroy had declined the wedded state until her twenty-ninth year, and had yet attained a highly respectable, if modest, condition, in the acceptance of her clergyman—but it would not do.

“For,” the good lady darkly pronounced, “Madam Lefroy’s excellent fortune is of no account, for there were many more eligible young men a quarter-century ago, before Buonaparte forced the country into regimentals. Cassandra I cannot reproach for tarrying in the single state, though she is several years your senior, for she would have got poor Tom Fowle if she could. But there—it was not to be. Let her misfortune be a lesson, my dear, and do not place your affections among such men as are likely to die of little trifling fevers.”
²

We were joined at breakfast by Henry and Eliza, who took notice of the day by pressing upon me a ravishing
headdress of apricot silk and feathers, purchased no doubt in Edgars Buildings, and quite admirably suited to my fashionable new gown.

Promptly at eleven the housemaid announced Lord Harold; he bid good morning to all the world, won an interesting sparkle from Eliza’s fine eyes, presented me with a posy, and voiced the hope that I might be granted many happy returns of the day. This little ceremony of deception being well-received, and the weather continuing to hold fine, his lordship did not scruple to suggest a country drive; and to the astonishment and dismay of all my family, I readily acceded to the whole, and hurried into my warmest pelisse. The Gentleman Rogue assured my father I should be much improved from the healthfulness of the airing, and that I should be returned unharmed before nightfall; and so we drove off, with an agreeable sensation of liberty on my part, and a distinct uneasiness behind.

“I expect to be arrived in Bristol by one o’clock at the latest, barring a mishap to the wheels,” Lord Harold observed as we trotted up Charles Street towards Monmouth, and the turning for the Bristol Road. “I shall regale you in the interval with an account of last evening’s adventures at the Theatre Royal.”

“Miss Conyngham was in evidence?”

“She was, though her brother Hugh was not. Indisposed, according to the program notes—perhaps the result of your too-lively dancing, Jane.”

“You do not think, that having failed in his efforts to silence
me
, he has summarily fled the city?”

“His sister assures me that he has not—but in her word I place the barest confidence. Upon quitting the Theatre Royal, however, I undertook to seek his lodgings—and was told that the gentleman was within, but was to see no one, under the strictest injunctions from his
doctor. And so I had not the least glimpse of the fellow, and cannot say whether he was there or no.”

“That is very bad.”

“Less bad, perhaps, than it at first appears. Mr. Conyngham is unlikely to desert his sister. Of Mr. Smythe, however, I cannot say so much.”

I drew the collar of my pelisse close about my throat, at the sensation of a sudden chill. “But you have some intelligence of Smythe?”

Lord Harold nodded. “I happened to enquire of an errand-boy in the wings, and for the price of a few pence was told that the constables had rousted the villain from bed in the small hours of yesterday morning. Being warned by his landlady, however, Smythe jumped from a back window, and made off through the alleyways unpursued.”

“He jumped from a window, you say? And was it a
first-floor
window?”

“You think of Her Grace’s anteroom! The same suspicion has animated us both. I eagerly enquired of the boy, and was told with the greatest pride and satisfaction that his hero Smythe disdained any distance under twenty feet. He is a tumbler by rearing, and was wont as a child to roam about the countryside with a band of performers known for their physical feats.”

“But this is excellent news!” I cried. “Did we find the guise of Pierrot discarded in his lodgings, we might free Lord Kinsfell today!”

“I had expected you to feel some trepidation in the knowledge that the man was at liberty. Are you so careless of security, Jane?”

I lifted a gloved hand to shade my eyes from the brilliance of the morning sun. The countryside beyond the city’s environs was blighted by the advance of winter—a brownish heap of rolling Somerset hills, dotted at random with the occasional beast; but my spirits would not
be oppressed even by fallow fields. “I cannot rejoice in his escape,” I admitted, “but must trust to Providence. Mr. Smythe is unlikely to adventure so perilous a town as Bath for some time to come. I will not indulge in excessive anxiety.”

“All the same—” Lord Harold began.

“I shall promise you never to venture out-of-doors without the company of another,” I said. “Now tell me of Miss Conyngham.”

“She refused to see me, of course, and so I was reduced to storming her dressing-room. I thought it wise to inform her that Mr. Elliot was hardly as satisfied with the case against my nephew as had once been believed, and that the magistrate was even now embarked upon the errand of tracing a curious bauble discarded in the cunning passage, that might well prove to be the property of the murderer. I was deliberately vague; but Miss Conyngham was observed to pale, and stagger a little for support—and she agreed at last to the space of a conversation.”

“And? Did she confess the whole?”

“Jane, Jane—would you have a woman go blindly to the scaffold? Naturally she did not. She intends to divine first how much I know. That I
suspect
a good deal—that I have perhaps learnt something to her detriment, from my researches or my nephew or both—she is completely aware. But she is confident I have not the conclusive proof; and so she intends to fence with me for as long as she is able.

“We sat down; and I found occasion to comment upon the Earl of Swithin’s interesting attentions to my niece—our belief that he intended to renew his offer for Mona’s hand—a few reflections on the disappointment of Mr. Portal’s death in that quarter—Mona ready to be consoled by the attentions of another—even Colonel Easton much in attendance—and Miss Conyngham’s visage was
observed to darken. I then made my
adieux
, and left her to consider the intelligence conveyed; and I hope very soon to see my stratagems bear fruit.”

“You are an incorrigible beast,” I calmly replied, “but as the lady seems deserving of no very great solicitude, I cannot abuse you as thoroughly as I might. Did she betray anxiety? Guilt? The desperation of an abandoned character?”